The Fallout has started! With the new changes to serps and adwords we are seeing a rise in price for those coveted top of the page ad spaces in the search results. We haven’t seen any huge shifts in CPC in aggregate just yet, but as this article clearly shows from the top of first page and top of page bid minimums are moving, and moving pretty steady, in an upward direction.
It’s still very early to assess the impact from these changes but it’s worth keeping an eye on and seeing how having four paid adds at the top of the results will affect organic if at all, and how the price will change up or down as the first four results will not be paid ad’s from here on out. Have you noticed any shifts? Has this lead to a change in your buying habits? We would love to hear about it.
We’re just about a month out from Google’s sweeping changes to desktop SERPs , in which text ads were removed entirely from the right-hand rail and the number of text ads appearing above organic results increasingly grew to four, where there used to be three. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, the overall impact of the change hasn’t been dramatic , with at most minimal shifts in CPCs and traffic. Two observations included in our previous analysis were: Rising first-page minimum bids for non-brand text ads, as the total available ad inventory decreased from a maximum of 11 text ads per page to seven. Decreasing top-of-page minimum bids for non-brand text ads, as the total available ad inventory above organic results increased from three to four for some searches. In the days since, we’ve seen first-page minimums continue to steadily increase, while top-of-page minimums appear to be back on the rise. While it’s too soon to attribute these changes precisely to causes, these are the symptoms we would expect if advertisers did get more aggressive with paid search bids as a result of the changes. Note: All data sourced from samples of Merkle advertisers, which range from medium to enterprise-level businesses. First-page minimum bids headed up and to the right Looking at the median change from February 8 through March 16 for a sample of advertisers year over year, we find that first-page minimum bids continue to increase steadily since the removal of right rail text ads. Looking at the first-page minimum change for 2015 over the same time frame, we find that there was a slight bump in first page minimum bids in mid-March last year. However, using last year’s data as a gauge for the seasonality of these minimums for the sample studied, it appears most of the increases observed in 2016 seem tied to the desktop SERP changes, as opposed to seasonal increases. Now, it’s very possible it’s just taking some time for these minimum bid estimates to get fully updated on Google’s end in light of the new auction limits and that there haven’t been any real changes in competition since the updates. However, it’s also possible that at least some advertisers are upping bids in an attempt to get ads that fell off of the first page of results with the changes to begin showing on the first page again. Google makes […]